'The Help'

The Help is a film made from a book by a white woman, Katherine Stockett, about relations between white families in Mississippi and their black servants during the 1960's. It's triggered a vigorous dispute between supporters and critics. The Los Angeles Times' Betsy Sharkey calls it "a delicious, peppery stew of home-cooked, 1960's Southern-style racism" that produces healthy laughter. The New York Times' Manohla Dargis calls it "a big, ole slab of honey-glazed hokum. We hear more from Kevin Richardson of the Clarion Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, where the film is set, and novelist Martha Southgate, who's written about the film in Entertainment Weekly.